The Collected Short Fiction, page 122
“Why?” he said, as if genuinely curious. I strode to a dead dogwood and tore free the chimes strung in its branches, flung the mess at Hoyle. He snatched it midflight, glanced at the handful of dog tags—rabies vaccinations and ID platelets—and nodded. Dozens upon dozens more clinked in their constellations on bushes, posts, clothes lines, woven into the trailer vents, every fucking where. I let him think about it while I used a branch to cover my tracks, the grooves where I’d towed him.
“Don’t you think the cops will put it together? They’ll catch you, Jess.”
“I hear Sheriff Brunner is a dumbass,” I said.
He chuckled. “Yeah. It’s true enough.”
Daylight was burning and restlessness overcame me. I gave the old boy a sip from my water bottle and tried to think of the proper words, settled for a goodbye kiss, quick and dry. We didn’t say anything for the longest time and eventually I turned and walked away. I looked over my shoulder once, right as I crested a rise that led to the road. Hoyle, indistinct at that distance, leaned forward and passed the Stetson over his legs, back and forth.
On the way through town to wherever, I stopped bold as brass, at Lonnie’s house. There was a bad moment where I worried Gunther and Leroy might’ve forgotten, had visions of getting rent limb from limb as I knelt to unleash them from the bumper of the truck. Not a chance. And when I popped the hatch, those bruisers piled into the back like they’d always belonged there.
We hit the highway eastbound, ascended into the hills and then the mountains. Kept right on going, flying.
Termination Dust
First published in Tales of Jack The Ripper, August 2013
Let be be finale of seem.
—Wallace Stevens
Hunting in Alaska, especially as one who enjoys the intimacy of knives, bludgeons, and cords, is fraught with peril. Politically speaking, the difference between a conservative and a liberal in the forty-ninth state is the caliber of handgun one carries. Le sigh. Despite a couple of close calls, you’ve not been shot. Never been shot, never been caught, knock on wood.
That’s what you used to say, in any event.
People look at you every day. People look at you every day, but they don’t see you. People will ask why and you will reply, Why not?
Tyson Langtree’s last words: “I tell you, man. Andy Kaufman is alive, man. He’s alive, bigger than shit, and cuttin’ throats. He’s Elvis, man. He’s the king of death.” This was overheard at the packed Caribou Creek Tavern on a Friday night about thirty seconds before bartender Lonnie DeForrest tossed his sorry ass out onto a snowbank. Eighteen below zero Fahrenheit and a two and a half mile walk home. Dead drunk, wearing coveralls and a Miners Do It Deeper ball cap.
Nobody’s seen the old boy since. Deputy Newcastle found a lot of blood in Langtree’s bed, though. Splattered on the walls and ceiling of his shack on Midnight Road. Hell of a lot of blood. That much blood and no corpse, well, you got to wonder, right? Got to wonder why Langtree didn’t just keep his mouth shut. Everybody knows Andy Kaufman is crazy as a motherfucker. He been whacking motormouth fools since ’84.
You were in the bar that night and you followed Langtree back to his humble abode. Man, he was surprised to see you step from the shadows.
For the record, his last words were actually, “Please don’t kill me, E!”
Jessica Mace lies in darkness, slightly drunk, wholly frustrated. Heavy bass thuds through the ceiling from Snodgrass’ party. She’d left early and in a huff after locking horns with Julie Vellum, her honorable enemy since the hazy days of high school. Is hate too strong an emotion to describe how she feels about Julie? Nope, hatred seems quite perfect, although she’s long since forgotten why they are at eternal war. Vellum—what kind of name is that, anyhow? It describes either ancient paper or a sheepskin condom. The bitch is ridiculous. Mobile home trash, bottom drawer sorority sister, tits sliding toward earth with a vengeful quickness. Easiest lay of the Last Frontier. A whore in name and deed.
JV called her a whore and splashed a glass of beer on her dress. Cliché bitch, so very cliché Obviously JV hadn’t gotten the memo that Jessica and Nate were through as of an hour prior to the party. The evil slut had carried a torch for him since he cruised into town with his James Dean too-cool-for-school shtick and set all the girlies’ hearts aflutter a few weeks before the Twin Towers crumbled a continent away.
Snodgrass, Wannamaker, and Ophelia, the beehive-hairdo lady from 510, jumped between them before the fur could fly. Snodgrass was an old hand at breaking up fistfights. Lucky for Julie, too. Jessica made up her mind to fix that girl’s wagon once and for all, had broken a champagne glass for an impromptu weapon when Snodgrass locked her in a bear hug. Meanwhile, Deputy Newcastle stood near the wet bar, grimly shaking his huge blond head. Or it might’ve been the deputy’s evil twin, Elam. Hard to tell through the crush of the crowd, the smoke, and the din. If she’d seen him with his pants down, she’d have known with certainty.
Here she is after the fracas, sulking while the rest of town let down its hair and would continue to do so deep into the night. Gusts from the blizzard shake the building. Power comes from an emergency generator in the basement. However, cable is on the fritz. She would have another go at Nate, but Nate isn’t around, he is gone-Johnson after she’d told him to hit the bricks and never come back no more, no more. Hasty words uttered in fury, a carbon copy of her own sweet ma who’d run through half the contractors and fishermen in the southeast during a thirty-year career of bar fights and flights from the law. Elizabeth Taylor of the Tundra, Ma. Nate, an even poorer man’s Richard Burton. Her father, she thought of nevermore.
Why hadn’t Nate been at the party? He always made an appearance. Could it be she’s really and truly broken his icy heart? Good!
She fumbles in the bedside drawer, pushing aside the cell charger, Jack’s photograph, the revolver her brother Elwood gave her before he got shredded by a claymore mine in Afghanistan, and locates the “personal massager” she ordered from Fredericks of Hollywood and has a go with that instead. Stalwart comrade, loyal stand-in when she’s between boyfriends and lovers, Buzz hasn’t let her down yet.
Jessica opens her eyes as the mattress sags. A shadow enters her blurry vision. She smells cologne or perfume or hairspray, very subtle and totally androgynous. Almost familiar. Breathless from the climax it takes her a moment to collect her wits.
She says, “Jack, is that you?” Which was a strange conclusion, since Jack presumably drifts along deep sea currents, his rugged redneck frame reduced to bones and sweet melancholy memories. All hands of the Prince Valiant lost to Davy Jones’s locker, wasn’t it? That makes three out of the four main men of her life dead. Only Nate is still kicking. Does he count now that she’s banished him to a purgatory absent her affection?
Fingers clamp her mouth and ram her head into the pillow hard enough that stars shoot everywhere. Her mind flashes to a vivid image: Gothic oil paintings of demons perched atop the bosoms of swooning women. So morbidly beautiful, those antique pictures. She thinks of the pistol in the dresser that she might’ve grabbed instead of the vibrator. Too late baby, too late now.
A knife glints as it arcs downward. Her attacker is dressed in black so the weapon appears to levitate under its own motive force. The figure slashes her throat with vicious inelegance. An untutored butcher. It is cold and she tastes the metal. But it doesn’t hurt.
Problem is, constant reader, you can’t believe a damned word of this story. The killer could be anyone. Cops recovered some bodies reduced to charcoal briquettes. Two of those charred corpses were never properly identified, and what with all the folks who went missing prior to the Christmas party…
My life flashed before my eyes as I died of a slashed throat and a dozen other terrible injuries. My life, the life of countless others who were in proximity. Wasn’t pretty, wasn’t neat or orderly, or linear. I experienced the fugue as an exploding kaleidoscope of imagery. Those images replay at different velocities, over and over in a film spliced together out of sequence. My hell is to watch a bad horror movie until the stars burn out.
I get the gist of the plot, but the nuances escape into the vacuum. The upshot being that I know hella lot about my friends and neighbors; just not everything. Many of the juiciest details elude me as I wander Purgatory, reliving a life of sin. Semi-omniscience is a drag.
In recent years, some pundits have theorized I was the Eagle Talon Ripper. Others have raised the possibility it was Jackson Bane, that he’d been spotted in San Francisco months after the Prince Valiant went down, that he’d been overheard plotting bloody revenge against me, Jessica, a dozen others. Laughable, isn’t it? The majority of retired FBI profilers agree.
Nah, I’m the hot pick these days. Experts say the trauma I underwent in Moose Valley twisted my mind. Getting shot in the head did something to my brain. Gave me a lobotomy of sorts. Except instead of going passive, I turned into a monster, waited twenty-plus years, and went on a killing spree.
It’s a sexy theory what with the destroyed and missing bodies, mine included. The killer could’ve been a man or woman, but the authorities bet on a man. Simple probability and the fact some of the murders required a great deal of physical strength and a working knowledge of knots and knives. I fit the bill on all counts. There’s also the matter of my journal. Fragments of it were pieced together by a forensics team and the shit in there could be misconstrued. What nobody knows is that after the earlier event in Moose Valley, I read a few psychology textbooks. The journal was just therapy, not some veiled admission of guilt. Unfortunately, I was also self-medicating with booze and that muddied the waters even more.
Oh, well. What the hell am I going to do about it now?
If you ask me, Final Girl herownself massacred all those people. What’s my proof? Nothing except instinct. Call me a cynic—it doesn’t seem plausible a person can survive a gashed throat and still possess the presence to retrieve a pistol, in the dark, no less, and plug the alleged killer to save the day. How convenient that she couldn’t testify to the killer’s identity on account of the poor lighting. Even more convenient how that fire erased all the evidence. In the end, it’s her word, her version of events.
Yeah, it’s a regular cluster. Take the wrong peg from this creaky narrative and the whole log pile falls on you. Nonetheless, you know. You know.
What if…What if they were in it together?
Nights grow long in the tooth. A light veil of snow descends the peaks. Termination dust, the sourdoughs call it. You wait and watch for signs. Geese fly backwards in honking droves, south. Sunsets flare crimson, then fade to black as fog rolls over the beach. People leave the village and do not return. A few others never left but are gone just the same. They won’t be returning either.
The last of the cruise ships migrated from Eagle Talon on Saturday. The Princess Wing blared klaxons and horns and sloshed up the channel in a shower of streamers and confetti, its running lights blazing holes through the mist. A few hardy passengers in red and yellow slickers braved the drizzle to perch along the rails. Some waved to the dockworkers. Others cheered over the rumble of the diesels. Seagulls bobbed aloft, dark scraps and tatters against the low clouds that always curtain this place.
You mingled with the people on the dock and smiled at the birds, enjoying their faint screams. Only animals seem to recognize what you are. You hate them too. That’s why you smile, really. Hate keeps you warm come the freeze.
Ice will soon clog the harbor. Jagged mountains encircle the village on three sides in a slack-jawed Ouroboros. The other route out of town is a two-mile tunnel that opens onto the Seward Highway. This tunnel is known as the Throat. Anchorage lies eighty miles north, as the gull flies. Might as well be the moon when winter storms come crashing in on you. Long-range forecasts call for heavy snow and lots of wind. There will come a day when all roads and ways shall be impassable.
You’ve watched. You’ve waited. Salivated.
You’ll retreat into the Estate with the sheep. It’s a dirty white concrete superstructure plonked in the shadow of a glacier. Bailey Frazier & Sons built the Frazier Estate Apartments in 1952 along with the Frazier Tower that same year. History books claim these were the largest buildings in Alaska for nearly three decades, and outside of the post office, cop shop, library, little red schoolhouse, the Caribou Tavern, and a few warehouses, that’s it for the village proper. Both were heavily damaged by the ’64 quake and subsequent tsunami. Thirteen villagers were swept away on the wave. Four more got crushed in falling debris. The Tower stands empty and ruined to this day, but the Estate is mostly functional; a secure, if decrepit, bulwark against the wilderness.
You are an earthquake, a tidal wave, a mountain of collapsing stone, waiting to happen. You are the implacable wilderness personified. What is in you is ancient as the black tar between stars. A void that howls in hunger and mindless antipathy against the heat of the living.
Meanwhile, this winter will be business as usual. Snowbirds flee south to California and Florida while the hardcore few hunker in dim apartments like animals in burrows and play cribbage or video games, or gnaw yourselves bloody with regret. You’ll read, and drink, and fuck. Emmitt Snodgrass will throw his annual winter gala. More drinking and even more fucking, but with the sanction of costume and that soul-warping hash Bobby Aickman passes around. By spring, the survivors will emerge, pale as moles, voracious for light as you are for the dark.
With the official close of tourist season, Eagle Talon population stands at one hundred and eighty-nine full-time residents. Three may be subtracted from that number, subtracted from the face of the earth, in fact, although nobody besides the unlucky trio and you know anything about that.
Dolly Sammerdyke. Regis and Thora Lugar. And the Lugars’ cat, Frenchy. The cat died hardest of them all. Nearly took out your eye. Maybe that will come back to haunt you. The devil’s in the…
Elam Newcastle is interviewed by the FBI at Providence Hospital. He has survived the Frazier Estate inferno with second degree burns and frostbite of his left hand. Two fingers may have to be amputated and the flesh of his neck and back possess the texture of melted wax. In total, a small price to pay considering the hell-on-Earth-scenario he’s escaped. His New Year’s vow is to find a better trade than digging ditches.
He tells the suit what he knows as the King of Pop hovers in the background, partially hidden by curtains and shadows. This phantom, or figment, has shown up regularly since the evening of the massacre at the Estate. Elam is not a fan and doesn’t understand why he’s having this hallucination of the singer grinning and gesticulating with that infamous rhinestone-studded glove. It is rather disturbing. Doubly disturbing since it’s impossible to attribute it to the codeine.
The investigator blandly reveals how the local authorities have recently found Elam’s twin brother deceased in the Frazier Tower. It was, according to the account, a gruesome spectacle, even by police standards. The investigator describes the scene in brief, albeit vivid, detail.
Elam takes in this information, one eye on the moonwalking apparition behind the FBI agent. Finally, he says, “Whaddaya mean they stole his hat?”
Scenes from an apocalypse:
Viewed from the harbor, Eagle Talon is an inkblot with a steadily brightening dot of flame at its heart. The Frazier Estate Apartments have been set ablaze. Meanwhile, the worst blizzard to hit Alaska since 1947 rages on. Flames leap from the upper stories, whipped by the wind. Window glass shatters. Fire, smoke, and driving snow boil off into outer darkness. That faint keening is either the shrieks of the damned as they roast in the penthouse, or metal dissolving like Styrofoam as the inferno licks it to ash. Or both.
Men and women in capes and masks, gossamer wings and top hats, mill in the icy courtyard. Their shadows caper in the bloody glare. They are the congregants of a frigid circle of Hell, summoned to the Wendigo’s altar. They join hands and begin to waltz. Flakes of snow and ash cover them, bury them.
The angry fire is snapping yellow. Pull farther out into the cold and the dark and fire becomes red through the filter of the blizzard, then shivers to black. Keep pulling back until there are no stars, no fire, no light of any kind. Only the snow sifting upward from the void to fill the world with silence and sleep.
We make love with the lights off. The last time, I figure. She calls me Jack when she comes and probably has no idea. Jackson Bane died on the Bering Sea two winters gone. His ghost makes itself known. He knocks stuff over to demonstrate he’s unhappy, like when I’m fucking his former girlfriend. Not hard to imagine him raving impotently behind the wall of sleep, working himself toward a splendorous vengeance. Perhaps that makes him more of a revenant.
My name is Nathan Custer. I fear the sea. Summertime sees me guiding tours on the glacier for Emmitt Snodgrass. Winter, I lie low and collect unemployment. Cash most of those checks down at the Caribou. Laphroaig is my scotch of choice and it’s a choice I make every livelong day, and twice a day once snow flies. Hell of an existence. I fought with Jack at Emmitt Snodgrass’ annual winter party in ’07. Blacked his eye and demolished a coffee table. Don’t even recall what precipitated the brawl. I only recall Jessica in a white tee and cotton shorts standing there with a bottle of Lowenbrau in her hand. Snodgrass forgave me the mess. We never patched it up, Jack and I.
Too late, now. Baby, it’s too late.
While Jessica showers, I prowl her apartment naked, peering into cupboards and out the window at snowflakes reflected in a shaft of illumination pitched by the twin lamps over the lobby foyer. Ten feet beyond the Estate wall lies a slate of nothingness. Depending on the direction, it’s either sea ice and, eventually, open black water, or mountains. This is five-oh-something in the P.M., December. Sun has been down for half an hour.
